Worst Homebrewing Mistakes - HBT Article

My Fellow Zythophiles:


I am preparing an article for the Home Brew Talk Front Page, and your contributions of knowledge and experience would be very much appreciated, by me of course, but also by all those who will read the article.

I decided to request your input because I've been very impressed with the help I've gotten here, and I want to do what I can to pay it forward by compiling some info -- your info -- in a single, convenient list.

A list of what, you ask?

Very simply, the article will discuss the worst or most common mistakes by beginning home brewers. I know when I started, a lot of technicalities seemed daunting then, but are just routine now. I could easily compile a list of my own mistakes and be done with the article, but honestly, you might well have had an experience that is more relevant, so a compilation of everyone's input will be more helpful to the noobs out there than my single opinion of the matter.

Please tell us all what you think are the worst mistakes people make when getting into home brewing, whether it's based on your own experience or your observing or helping someone else to get started.

You don't have to be an expert to contribute! If you started brewing only yesterday and made a terrible mistake but already know the solution, that's just as helpful.

I would like to cite you if your topic is selected for the article. I'd prefer to use real names, but if you'd rather remain anonymous, I get it -- just note your preference and I'll respect it. If I may use your real name, note it in your reply or send me a PM.

I would like to submit the article to the editor by Friday, August 14.

I look forward to hearing from you!

In my opinion, the biggest mistake new Brewers make is over complicating the process. It is entire possible to make very good beer without a whole lab worth of equipment.

It isn't necessary to obsess over every last degree or the phase of the moon. Just brew it!

After 1000's "d'oh!!!" moments I still make great beer. So I wouldnt say there are many "worst" mistakes to make. Just don't cut corners, but don't be afraid to experiment, and you'll never be disappointed.

I would give the advice to always go bigger (not necessarily more expensive or complicated) with your equipment than you initially intend. I've spent way more money trying to do things smaller and cheaper when I should have just bought what I wanted in the first place (ie. Get the 10 gallon brew kettle instead of settling for the 7.5, etc)

Among the worst mistakes a new homebrewer can make is attempting a complicated recipe before they have a good understanding of the basic brewing process and can successfully create a simple brew.

Re-posting my answer to the Write Better Instructions thread.

Not so much directions as what I did on my first batch:

0. Get drunk.
1. Throw everthing into a pot that is too small.
2. Heat to boil.
3. Boil over. Repeat.
4. Forget to add hops. Or add hops late. Or some other plan you won't remember because of step 0. (Note: the next day your will find hops all over the floor. Throw these out.)
5. Let sit out over night. Don't worry, it will still be quite warm the next day. Perfect temperature for microbial growth.
6. Hydrate yeast in 130F water to annihilate them. Toss dead yeast in wort.
7. Cover with plastic wrap, but not too tightly to allow fruit flies easy access.
8. Stick in bath tub of water for temp control. Optional: remove pot when taking a shower.
9. Constantly remove lid to see if it is fermenting yet.
10. When fermentation does not start after 3 days (see step 6), get a new packet of dry yeast and toss it it. Fermentation will now be vigorous.
11. Harvest yeast by skimming kreusen with spoon. Important: spoon must not be sanitized.
12. Leave on vacation for a week.
13. After a week, smell wort. If it smells like vinegar, congratulations, you're ready to throw out your first batch of beer! If vinegar smell not apparent yet, remove plastic wrap to introduce more fruit flies. Wait another week. Remember, throwing out beer takes patience.

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markstache said:

Re-posting my answer to the Write Better Instructions thread.

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Liked it before, liked it again. Great stuff @markstache . Hats off

OP. There's your article

Worst home brewing mistake instructions: Fermentation will be done in four days. Your beer is ready to bottle.

It looks done (it's been 5 days) time to bottle. Don't get an accurate volume or weight the priming sugar.

Using StarSan (or Bleach!) on dirty equipment. (you can't sanitize dirty.)

leave the valve open and transfer down the drive way (or kitchen floor)

leave the water on and overflow the vessel, don't check chiller connections and run gallons of water into your wort during chilling

flars said:

Worst home brewing mistake instructions: Fermentation will be done in four days. Your beer is ready to bottle.

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Dang, @flars clicked post right before me. But one better! Bottle on the 4th day!

Not pay attention after starting wort chiller and having boiling hot water come out onto your hand for a few seconds. Very lucky the burn wasn't worse. ALWAYS pay attention to everything, but more so when there is the potential for disaster.

Left temperature probe out of fermentation chamber by accident, heat was left on 36 hours, temperature reached over 50 degrees Celcius.

Taking your gear to a mates house if you're not prepared or are inexperienced - had left half my stuff at home, took twice as long, got volumes wrong, had to cut boil short, made heaps of mistakes. Still ended up with an OK Marzen at the end of it (weak and thin though), but it was probably my worst brewing experience to date.

David Marshall

i know for me the biggest thing was not being properly set up during brew time. having to measure out hops/putting grain in grain bags/ proper cool down methods especially since i did not have a wort chiller in the beginning.

as for what ive learned being about 10 brews in. fermentation temp is so so important and i feel that has hindered/helped my beers the most.

Over boiling my wort. It gets you a higher than expected og but less of what you worked so long and hard on.

I think one of the biggest mistakes you can do on brew day is to drink before you start or early on. Obviously having a beer while brewing is great, but it takes a lot of experience under you belt to be able to finish a lot of brewing tasks a little off from sober. Be clear headed and follow directions! At least until the boil starts...

Accidentally reset the 60 min countdown timer on your phone mid-boil with hop additions remaining...

markstache said:

Re-posting my answer to the Write Better Instructions thread.

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Laughed so hard I started crying..

m1k3 said:

leave the valve open and transfer down the drive way (or kitchen floor)

leave the water on and overflow the vessel, don't check chiller connections and run gallons of water into your wort during chilling

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Started laughing uncontrollably again .. recovered and recalled I've done this at least 3 times...


Complete a full brew, then realise that my smackpack yeast is still in the fridge unsmacked.
Keep adding hot water to raise a low mash temp then realise the thermometer probe isn't in the mash.
Pass out while waiting for wort to chill, for an ale... dropped wort temp down to 50.

When I first started I'd fill my fermenters to the brim with sanitizer. Didn't occur to until later it was a waste of sanitizer, just a gallon or so was sufficient.

Ferment temp control, I only used a swamp cooler after brew four.

Stupid really, since a cement bucket costs all of five bucks..

My first brew was an extract pilsner and I had no idea what I was doing. Followed kit instructions then added a crap load of hops to an already hopped extract. Bitter awfulness. I then spent ages reading articles on the internet and eventually ended up at John Palmer's web page.

So, in my opinion a big mistake is not researching before starting brewing, or having a semi-experienced brewer help you out.

Worst (possible) misstakes are those that are dangerous.
Glass carbouys come to mind. Boil overs also. And not in the least, leaving water in the immersion chiller, without hoses attached and dunking it in the boiling wort will cause an unintentional steam shower.
Don't lift 5+ gallons of almost boiling wort to put it in a water bath for chilling.
Basically, just avoid the dangerous stuff, and the worst you can do is ruining a batch of beer, which isn't that bad.
+1 on staying sober until brewing is done (yes, you can have a beer, but not twelve).

After sanitizing my fermenters, I too have left the valve in the "on" position and found giant puddles of wort to wipe up. Or, I failed to properly mix in the priming sugar, making some bottles glass grenades, some bottles gushers and the rest under-carbonated.

mine would be:

right after pitching yeast, i was trying to get the blow off setup all ready to rock for my bucket. i had the lid over the (full) bucket and due to the tight fit between the grommet and the airlock piece, it sent the lid grommet into the wort/beer.

i should have known because i almost did it the week before.

Ok. Well, here are a few that are terrible and were all committed by myself on my first brew:

1. Didn't treat tap water with Campden tablets for Chlorine/chloramines (big mistake).

2. LME expired 11/2009. I brewed this in Sep. of 2014.

3. Scorched the hell out of the LME.

4. Measured my DME incorrectly, got about half the required amount in there.

5. Pitched yeast at ~72°. No temp control.

6. After realizing my DME error, days after picthing, boiled up some DME and added it. Added when it was hot... don't think that ever fermented out completely.

This resulted in the very first Green Apple Irish Stout, complete with fusel alcohol burn and plastic-y/burnt hotdog aftertaste.

Still have some bottles if anyone wants to do a trade.

alphaomega said:

[snip]
+1 on staying sober until brewing is done (yes, you can have a beer, but not twelve).

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Worst advice ever.

"don't check chiller connections and run gallons of water into your wort during chilling"

Yup. Nearly ruined my first all-grain batch that way. The good news is that it still came out very drinkable (though a bit low on body).

Someone above mentioned forgetting Campden tablets. I can go a little beyond that; last weekend I couldn't find the damn things! I hadn't put them where I always put them, for some reason. I was all set up and had the HLT filled so I went ahead and brewed. It will be a few weeks before I learn the consequences of that little goofup.

The big coincidence is that both of the above-mentioned brews were the same recipe (SNPA clone). I might have to stop making that one.

Some of my more spectacular SNAFUs:

--Not being mindful of fermentation temps. Had an IPA fermenting close to 80.
--Not being mindful of sanitation. Ended up with 50 bottles of nasty, sour Irish red that erupted upon opening.
--Bottling, then noticing after about 30 were capped, the priming sugar solution still sitting on the counter.
--Bought a bunch of QD connectors for the water going in and out of my IC. Didn't bother to run a pressure test with those cheap, Chinese fittings beforehand. On brew day, it was like a water park in my garage.

Since this is a compilation, I will second a few of the previously mentioned:

- Never add LME to cool/cold water. I would have thrown that pot in the trash, but I was going to clean the scorched LME off of the bottom on general principal.

- Sanitation. Two cases of Russian Imperial Stout down the drain. This was my second batch of RIS and I don't remember how many batches overall. The first batch of RIS was outstanding. The second ended up in a soaked dining room carpet mess that I found upon returning home at 11:00 pm one evening.

- Chlorine. I just started treating the tap water. Maybe I just want to notice a difference, but there is a noticeable change for the better in my brews.

1) Temperature control is worth every penny. If you can't afford/don't have room, brew with something that can handle the heat.
2) Your beer doesn't care at all about how long it should take to ferment. It'll be ready when it's damn well ready.
3) Do not (NOT!) turn your back on the kettle as it's coming to a boil. On my third brew I managed to have a boil over, get cleaned up, put it back on the heat, turn around FOR ONE FVKNG SECOND, and have a second boilover.
Sidenote: If you're wanting to make friends with wife, best not to smoke up the house and create an impossibly hard to clean stove in one night.

I've made similar mistakes to many already noted. It helps me a lot to have a printed procedure to go by, and keep it handy while brewing or bottling.

These are some things that seem to be common throughout the "help I'm a noob" threads:

1. Not reading up enough on simple brewing techniques and just trying to figure things out as you go.

2. Not having some kind of ferment temp control.

3. Trusting the guy at the lhbs, whether that be in buying equipment, ingredients, and/or instructions on brewing techniques.

4. Not pitching enough yeast, and/or not handling yeast properly.

5. Being impatient and racking/packaging too early.

6. Not brewing a proven recipe.

7. Trusting kit instructions.

8. Not becoming a member here first and reading through a lot of the aforementioned "help a noob" threads.

9. Going off of airlock activity when determining when fermentation is completed, instead of gravity measurements, and/or measuring FG with a refractometer.

10. Dumping out a beer because you realized you made one of the previous mistakes and therefore assumed the batch was ruined.

Last year about 1/2 my batches were bottled without stirring the priming sugar, resulting in varying degrees of carbonation, which was sad, because it's hard to fully assess a recipe/process if the last step (carbonation) was screwed up.

Everyone else's comments are great, especially the not needing 5 gallons of starson (though it's not really a mistake, but an optimization of your brew day)

Treating every batch like your life depends on a successful outcome.

It's not the last batch you'll ever brew. If something's not perfect this time, make note of what you did and do something else next time. Don't freak out over every little imperfection. In other words, RDWHAHB.

Storage. Keeping carbed/carbing bottles in 75F or less. Not only does this greatly increase shelf-life, last year I nearly murdered my own cat with a pair of exploding bottles in 105F temps. Poor little guy escaped harm but it could have been a lot worse!

Not enough oxygenation, pitching yeast too hot, remove from primary too soon.

Local home brew supply store ground half of my grains and put in bag with the other half not ground. Figuring out the oddity in my OG after my mash was really stumping me, until I looked closely at the BIAB grains I dumped in the compost pile. Talk about low efficiency!

JonM said:

Treating every batch like your life depends on a successful outcome.

It's not the last batch you'll ever brew. If something's not perfect this time, make note of what you did and do something else next time. Don't freak out over every little imperfection. In other words, RDWHAHB.

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You had me until that last sentence!

ersonal pet peeve:

Using PBW on Aluminum.

Thinking through every detail of system design only to find you've overlooked ferm temp control.

MaxStout said:

Some of my more spectacular SNAFUs:



--Not being mindful of fermentation temps. Had an IPA fermenting close to 80.

--Not being mindful of sanitation. Ended up with 50 bottles of nasty, sour Irish red that erupted upon opening.

--Bottling, then noticing after about 30 were capped, the priming sugar solution still sitting on the counter.

--Bought a bunch of QD connectors for the water going in and out of my IC. Didn't bother to run a pressure test with those cheap, Chinese fittings beforehand. On brew day, it was like a water park in my garage.

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Dude, you just lol'd they shiz outa me. Hilarious.